Along with outright lying about "getting wind" of Sotomayor's temparment when he conducted the vetting for Alito, Rove inadvertently reveals something so much more base about the Republican's dislike of Sotomayor.
What they don't like, and by the way, we're talking about Republican men, is a woman who is smarter than they are and who dares to show it. (See, e.g, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Madeline Albright, and now, Justice Sotomayor).
Rove's Exhibit A of Sotomayor's horrible, caustic, temperament is that that she had the temerity to mark up her colleague's draft opinions
Well -- in conference, excuse me -- what she would do is she would mark them up like she was your English school teacher and -- with your typos and misspellings and other words that she wanted to have changed, and send them back to her colleagues -- not exactly the best way to ingratiate yourself with your colleagues
Right, because how dare the "lady" tell a fellow judge that he or she has misspellings in an opinion that will ultimately be issued by the Second Freaking Circuit. I guess a judge with a better temperament would just ignore teh stoopid judge's misspellings? (And that's putting aside the obvious fact that in all likelihood, the draft opinions that future Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor was editing with such a wicked, rude pen, were written by her colleague's clerks, not her "equals," as Karl calls them.)
And as McJoan noted, under Karl's rubric for what makes for a good colleague and collegial judge, current Justice Scalia should be impeached. His condescending questions to lawyers appearing before the Court is legendary. As for the way he treats his colleagues, look no further than his stinging rebuke of Kennedy, et. al, in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas
Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.
Such a kind, civil voice accusing his colleagues of signing on to the "so-called homosexual agenda." (By the way, who calls it that, Antonin?). Yes, Scalia is fine compared to Sotomayor's caustic, red pen edits (which, by the way, never saw the light of day to embarrass the authors of these draft opinions. Scalia, on the other hand, never misses an opportunity to drop f-bomb footnotes to his "colleagues," in his opinions, which are preserved for all times in the Supreme Court's decisions).
But perhaps the most delicious part of all this gender card bullshit is how even Greta Van Sustren, that paragon of feminism, seemed a little put off by Karl's indictment of Sotomayor for insisting on good grammar:
VAN SUSTEREN: You make me nervous about the times I correct people for grammatical errors. I'm not going to do it anymore...
ROVE: No, no, no, you should. But if they're colleagues, if they're equals, I mean, you've got to be very careful about [unintelligible] getting out your red pen and marking it up like you're their English teacher.
Replace "equals" and "colleagues" with "men" and Karl's message is abundantly clear.
Girls are just fine as long as they are, as the old saying goes, seen, but not heard. When will we finally live in a world where people like Karl are neither seen, nor heard, on the TeeVee?